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Hell

Moses outlines the festivals that followers of the Lord are commanded to celebrate. Interestingly enough, celebration was the topic at last Sunday’s sermon, which… took place on the day after I was supposed to write about Numbers 29.

The problem with the sermon, as well-meaning as I believe the pastor to have been, is that it sounded a lot like “if you’re somber or sad, then you’re not being a good Christian.” This is a little too close to what has been called prosperity theology, or the prosperity gospel. To quote Wikipedia,

“Prosperity theology teaches that Christians are entitled to well-being and, because physical and spiritual realities are seen as one inseparable reality, this is interpreted as physical health and economic prosperity.”

It is also noted that followers and preachers of the prosperity gospel view poverty and sickness as spiritual ailments or curses that can be alleviated through faith. My partner has had some very negative experiences with churches that follow prosperity theology.

Poverty and illness are curses? Yeah, I mean it’s a damn shame to be sick or poor, and I believe that dedicated faith can lead to greater willpower and desire which can in turn lead to financial success. However, I don’t think that God’s plan for people involves or guarantees financial well-being. Poverty is not a sign of God’s disfavor.

Can poor personal habits and a lack of direction lead to poverty? Yes. But I don’t think that physical, material wealth has much to do with faith in Christ.

I see this situations as teaching surrender to God and His will, as opposed to undesirable curses. Does being poor debilitate a person? Damn right it does. I’ve lived with it for a long time, and sitting around that poverty line is depressing. It emotionally and spiritually drains you. Or it can.

But regardless, God can and will give you the strength to work through it, if you ask. “Thy will be done, in all things.” I seriously hate the phrase “Let go and let God,” but it’s important to ask that His will be done, that He may guide you to it.

Can the principles in the Bible teach you to be rich? Probably? I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but I’m willing to bet that if that’s the motivation one has while reading it, one will find a variety of implementable tips or lessons for financial success.

And just to be clear, I have no problem with people who want to be rich. I myself am determined to achieve some measure of wealth, to surpass my parents and my family, to provide for my own family and possible future children.

However, I think we, especially as Christians, have to see wealth as a means and not an end. Wealth as an end is idolatrous. But with wealth, one can do many things and help many others. We should seek to do our best as Christians even in poverty, but if we are wealthy, then our goal should still be to serve and glorify God.

Bill Gates is probably my favorite example of a wealthy person who does amazing things with his riches. Go to the website of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Read the 2014 annual letter. If that doesn’t restore some of your faith in humanity, I don’t know what will.

Wealth and power are responsibilities. Health and stability may be gifts if God intends them to be, but they may make us complacent.

“[A]s there may be pleasures in Hell (God shield us from them), there may be something not all unlike pains in Heaven (God grant us soon to taste them).”

— C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

In Numbers 29, the Israelites are commanded to celebrate, but every day of these festivals and celebrations involves sacrifices and offerings to God. Even, or especially, in our celebrations, we are told to humble ourselves to God, to supplicate ourselves before Him, and to glorify Him in all things.

In sorrow and in joy, do not forget the Lord.

Numbers 30

Oh my goodness, I went and looked at Matthew Henry’s unabridged commentary. It made my head hurt a little.

Numbers 30 concerns the making of vows, oaths, and pledges. Basically, at its core, this chapter states that a man who makes a vow must not break his word.

That’s a quote, by the way: “[H]e must not break his word but must do everything he said.”

This chapter also outlines how fathers and husbands have the power to override vows made by their daughters and wives, respectively. I think this is meant to be indicative of the Biblical position of fathers/husbands as the heads of households, which I think is intended to correlate with how God (the Father) is meant to be the head of the Church, both as a collective and as the singular body of worship that one human being offers.

Now, I don’t have the book in front of me, but I am reminded of the book Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill. If I recall correctly, he talks at some point(s) about the importance of keeping one’s word or speaking the truth. Or maybe I’m thinking of The Four Agreements, in which I know for a fact the author Don Miguel Ruiz outlines the importance of what he calls “being impeccable with [one’s] word.”

“Impeccable,” by the way, comes from a Latin word, meaning “not liable to sin.” An impeccable word is free of sin.

The way I see it, breaking vows erodes the strength of one’s soul. You make a habit of being disingenuous, of saying things that you have no intention of following through upon, of being careless in word and in deed. There is some Biblical support for this, I think:

“Better not to vow than to vow and not pay.”

— Ecclesiastes 5:5

Keep those words and deeds in line, dear readers! Keep that soul strong, exercise the power of your will, that you may have more dedication to offer to God.

Five days into this project and I’m already having a crisis of faith. Yesterday when I decided to make coffee in the morning I chose an oversized mug with a drawing of the Buddha. It felt so weird.

I have a copy of the Bible (maybe two or three), a copy of the Quran, a copy of the Book of Mormon, and, somewhere around here, a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. I also have my medicine cards and my own spiritual experiences, both intense and mundane.

I feel strange delving so deeply into the Christian faith. This is a faith that I for many years, rejected, and in many ways I still do. I understand that God is, I have felt that presence and as far as I can tell, spoken with Him. I have prayed to God in the name of Jesus Christ.

But I usually append that, and while I pray to no one but God, I often pray “in the name” of various wise, intelligent, and spiritual people the world over. I have added people such as Carl Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, and others which I cannot at this time remember. It has been a while since I have formally prayed. I have even prayed in the name of all of humanity.

One thing I do not enjoy which seems to be a part of modern American life is that faith tends to be equated with scientific ignorance as a necessity. I don’t get it, and I don’t see why this is often the case. In my opinion, if one’s faith crumbles at the presence of observable, objective facts (as much as such a thing is possible, anyway), then it is my opinion that a person with such a problem would need to do some praying and reconciling of their faith.

Take, for example, the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation. Detectable with powerful telescopes, it seems that all throughout the universe there is a small “static,” if you will, of faint radiation that comes from no discernible source. It is almost uniform, and it can be found even where an optical telescope would find “black” or empty sky between stars or galaxies.

The CMB is everywhere. When variations that are observed within the CMB are modeled, the only explanation that matches up with observed data is the “Big Bang” model of cosmic expansion and universal creation. Does this mean that an unmeasurable, spiritual-bodied God had no hand in the universe? Not at all. My explanation or interpretation (back on Day 1) allows for the idea that God sparked the universe and all of existence into being.

Now, a hypothetical person might say, “You said observable fact. CMB is observable from microwave detectors and radio telescopes. How does this mean anything to me?” So, maybe bad choice on my part. But the fact is that when you turn on a TV or a radio to a channel with nothing but static, a very tiny amount of that static is indeed coming from the CMB. It exists.

The other thing I do not enjoy about (I was going to say Christianity but ideas don’t do anything in and of themselves so let’s say) some Christians specifically, although I’m sure practitioners of other religions do this as well, is their tendency to focus on differences rather than similarities. Basically, the main tenet of Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity which removes a lot of the details and rituals of Catholicism, is that the man named Jesus from the town of Nazareth was indeed the Son of God, that He performed miracles in his lifetime, that He died upon the cross to redeem all of humanity’s sins, and that by accepting Him as your Lord and savior, you allow yourself a path to Heaven. Yes, there are other important details, like the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and the Second Coming and all that, but the reason John 3:16 is probably the most famous verse of the New Testament is because Christ’s death is the crux (no pun intended, I promise) of the Christian faith. Jehovah’s Witnesses celebrate no holidays other than the anniversary of the day Christ died, because it was on that day that he offered salvation for all humanity.

(Jesus, a page and a half and I haven’t even started on today’s chapter.)

Anyway, the thing that gets me is that literally any faith in the whole wide world that doesn’t focus on Jesus Christ and his role as savior is immediately wrong. And that’s pretty much all there is to it! Religions that had been established for hundreds if not thousands of years are all wrong if they do not include the acceptance of Jesus Christ as their savior.

This has never made sense to me.

I don’t understand how God could create the world, scatter humanity all over the globe, allow us different cultures and languages (discussion on the Tower of Babel will come later), and somehow expect everyone to rally behind one Jew from the Middle East!

Maybe it is something that will come with time. But from what I know about people and about psychology, conversion via condemnation seems like a terrible f***ing strategy to me, and that’s the only word I can use to describe how opposed I am to it.

If you want people to understand, accept, and love God and Jesus Christ, then you need to show them the parallels, not the differences. People are not just going to wake up one day and abandon the faith of their fathers and grandfathers or mothers and grandmothers or whatever and suddenly switch over. I’m not saying such sudden “miraculous” conversion is impossible, just that it is highly unlikely.

And even if God wants the whole world to accept Jesus Christ as their savior, a) there must have been a reason for all these other cultures and stories and myths and faiths in the grand scheme of things, and b) I don’t see how God would expect them to accept Jesus without being able to relate to or understand the stories and the principles and everything else!

I got into a long debate with my partner late one night about this very issue. It was her belief that God speaks to all of us, which I agree with, but then we differ on the idea that people always recognize that voice as God. She says that people choose not to accept God. I explained to her that I didn’t accept God until I truly felt God, what people call the Holy Spirit. In the course of one evening, my life changed. I felt the Holy Spirit and I understood why there was suffering and despair in the world, which previously had been an obstacle toward my acceptance of God.

Over the course of one evening, I was overcome with both joy and despair before settling on acceptance. It was a three-step process. I overcame the philosophical “problem of evil” by realizing that human beings a) have “free will” (going to leave a “sort of” here; this is another thing I won’t get into right now) and that b) human beings grow with a certain amount of stress or suffering. By not having a perfect life, we look for ways to grow or to solve problems, thus expanding ourselves and making our lives and the lives of others better.

For humans and humanity to achieve their full potential, there has to be suffering. One story of Satan, which at some point I will be able to confirm or deny as Biblical, one story that I have heard is that Satan wanted to make the world a perfect place where all of humanity was forced to accept God. The Good Lord said “No” because apparently that’s not how the plan is supposed to work.

So humanity as represented by all the individual humans has the “choice” to accept or reject God. And if that choice is dependent on a human being’s experiences and life up to that point… and that life has been nothing but terrible… then I just don’t see that it’s likely (although I do accept that it is possible) for that person to accept or love God.

During this discussion I brought up the song “Hasa Diga Ebowai,” from the award-winning Broadway musical, The Book of Mormon. The song is sung mostly by members of a village in Uganda in Africa, and they say that having a saying, the titular “hasa diga ebowai,” that helps them make it through all their terrible circumstances, which include “war, poverty, famine” and the fact that “eighty percent of [them] have AIDS.” This is all put to an upbeat and sprightly tune, which makes it all the more shocking for the Mormon missionaries when they learn that “hasa diga ebowai” means “F*** you, God.”

My point in explaining this (hilarious and well-written, if blasphemous) song both to my partner and here as part of this post is that it serves as a good example for what became my overall point: If people don’t understand God or have never felt that love or peace, how can they be expected to accept God? And if they don’t accept or believe in God, then how can they see His presence in their lives? And if they don’t see His presence and the little “coincidences” (which are anything but) for what they are, then how can they be expected to understand Him? And so on and so forth.

My partner didn’t have an answer. But to me it is a clear cycle that can be broken with new experiences or information presented in an appropriate, understandable way. You can’t just tell a Hindu or Muslim family or whatever to accept Jesus. They simply don’t have enough understandable information to make that decision.

I don’t really believe in Hell, personally, not really as a physical realm. One person I met in college who had been studying to be a Christian (or Catholic, I don’t recall which) priest before coming out and accepting his homosexuality, this person told me about Christian Universalism. The main tenet that separates them from traditional Christianity is the belief in “universal reconciliation,” which states that “all will eventually be reconciled to God without exception, the penalty for sin is not everlasting” (Wikipedia.org, Christian Universalism). This means that Universalists do not believe in Hell. The argument this person put forth to me was “The life of a human being is finite, and a loving God would not make someone suffer infinite punishment for finite sin.” Yes, the wages of sin trickle down and down from person to person, but still. I think this makes sense. I shall analyze this view in light of scripture as I proceed through the Bible.

This seems like a good point to bring up, once again, The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz. You might as well get used to it, dear reader, because it’s going to come up a lot. Anyway, in TFA, Ruiz writes, in short, that Hell is a state of mind, a state of mind in which we suffer the “fire” of our own negative emotions. The burning sensations of anger, envy, and jealousy are the “fires” of Hell. The idea of Hell as punishment exists in this state of mind as well, because we punish ourselves and beat ourselves up endlessly for things we do and don’t do, or say or don’t say. We live in this state of fire and punishment. We live in a state of Hell.

Ruiz writes that if Hell is a state of mind, then so is Heaven. To Christians or whoever: I’m not opposed to the idea of Heaven being a place, but even in the Bible, I think Heaven is also a state of mind. Look to Luke 17, verses 20 and 21. In the NKJV, Jesus tells the people,

“The kingdom of God does not come with observation; nor will they say, ‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’ For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you.”

— Jesus Christ, Luke 17:20-21

In the NIV, He says that “the kingdom of God is in your midst.” In his famous speech at the end of The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin cites this with such vibrant passion that I am almost overcome with emotion every single time I hear it.

“In the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written, ‘the kingdom of God is within man’ — not one man, nor a group of men, but in all men, in you, you the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.”

— Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator

My God, even now, just writing it and hearing it in my mind it gives me chills. Don Miguel Ruiz writes that human beings, living as we do in a dream-like state, have the power to dream Hell or Heaven. Ruiz says, poignantly, “My choice is to dream Heaven. What’s yours?”

Genesis 5

That seems as good a spot as any to end on. If I were to keep going, I’d never get to today’s chapter. Which would defeat the whole objective of this project. So let me flip back from Luke (page 500-something in my Bible) to Genesis 5 (page 3). Oh, my aching head.

We have another few examples here of the non-literality of the word “day,” but I’m so tired of swinging this stick to beat that dead horse, so I’m going to just leave it. The other thing we have here is a ton of genealogy stuff. So much begetting.

Back to the line of Adam, we have Seth, Adam’s new son, we have Seth’s son Enosh, Enosh’s son Cainan, then Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch (more on him in a minute), Methuselah, Lamech, and finally Noah. Well, not finally, because in closing, Genesis 5 tells us that Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

Methuselah is famous because according to the Bible he was the oldest man who ever lived: nine hundred and sixty-nine years of age. And he and everyone else died.

…Except Enoch. Enoch is the only person whose tabulation of years is not immediately followed by “and he died.” Enoch, interestingly enough, is described twice as having “walked with God” (Gen 5:22 and 5:24) and his part of the story ends with “and he was not, for God took him.” The NIV translates it thusly: “Enoch walked faithfully with God; then he was no more, because God took him away” (Gen 5:24, NIV).

Either case, Enoch is not described as having died. There are different beliefs all across the Abrahamic spectrum (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) regarding Enoch and his fate. The apocryphal (and totally bad-ass) Book of Enoch basically describes him being brought alive into Heaven, perhaps the only human being to have done so. Another interpretation is that he possessed such purity that he was taken or killed before his time so that he might not be corrupted. Yet another is that he was granted immortality in some form or another, but not taken to Heaven.

I like to think that Enoch was taken up to Heaven to serve as scribe and as the Metatron who sometimes serves as the voice of God. This idea is not based on anything in particular save for esoteric Jewish texts and a brief section in the Talmud where Elisha ben Abuyah, a rabbi, entered Heaven/Paradise and saw the Metatron sitting next to God.

As an aside, I always thought Metatron sounded very sci-fi, or like the name of a Transformer (™ Hasbro), but finding out what it actually means is near impossible. I will direct interested readers to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metatron, where an analysis of possible etymologies can be found.

Anyway, I like this idea not because it is based on anything but simply because it is awesome and very mystical in an old-world sense. It probably helps that society and literature have used allusions to such concepts since time immemorial, but I am absolutely fascinated with esoteric aspects of Judeo-Christian mythology. And that’s all I have to say about that.

But today we are concerned about scripture. Canonical scripture. I couldn’t tell you why all the people in Genesis 5 lived so long. I have read before that this was taken as an example of the dwindling purity of mankind that trickled down from Adam, that had Adam not been removed from Eden he would have lived forever. This is possible, but in Genesis 2 it seems to be implied that only by eating of the tree of life would Adam and Eve have lived forever. But maybe that wasn’t even a concern until after they had eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Like I said before, God didn’t say they’d die immediately.

and ho-ho-holy crap. This is way more information than I would ever think to include! I’m already tired from all this writing. The interested reader will direct their attention to the above link and read what is there written. I’m not about to go that far in depth.

But the interesting point that this site makes is that these particular names and this genealogy exists so that an interested party could track the lineage of the man who would be Jesus Christ. Supposedly, this accounts for the capitalization of “Seed” in Genesis 3:15, to which I had previously paid little attention.

I will end today’s tiring essay with the observation of Genesis 5:29.

“And he called his name Noah, saying, ‘This one will comfort us concerning our work and the toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord has cursed.”

— Genesis 5:29

Lamech seems to realize that life is miserable and full of toil because of the sins of their forefathers and the punishment for those sins that came from the Lord. Lamech either wishes or knows that Noah will in some way comfort or perhaps deliver humanity from this suffering. And then after almost 600 more years, Lamech dies, never having witnessed Noah fulfill his destiny.

But fulfill and deliver he shall.

Have a good day, everyone. I hope this is as interesting and thought-provoking for you as it is for me.